It has been stereotyped to the point of being the basis for movies and is frequently the center of jabs and jokes: That image of a man in his fourth or fifth decade behind the wheel of his brand new motorcycle or very small, very fast red sports car. It is the mid-life crisis. Everyone knows what it is to the point of almost both totally expecting and accepting it.

You might realize this already, but the reason that so many people — both women and men — end up having mid-life crises is not just because they are at the half-way point of their lives and are feeling a stronger sense of their mortality. There are a significant number of people out there who face similar crises at the quarter-life mark as well, when the end of life still seems like a long way off.

People usually have these crises of purpose and identity at points when something in their environment shifts enough to allow them to come up for air for a second and see their life from a different perspective. For people who have a crisis in the middle of their life, that moment is often when their kids have grown up and headed off to college. The thing that they had focused on for 18 years no longer needs all of their attention. For all of those years, a lot of people are engaged in simply doing what needed to be done from moment to moment. Being knee deep in diapers or rushing from work to shuttle the kids to a soccer game does not leave much time for contemplating the overarching meaning of your life.

For people who have a quarter-life crisis, the impetus can be that they have finally finished college or graduate school and they all of a sudden realize that they are adults, outside of the protected environment of their parents’ home or the safety of the bubble they were in while they were in school. The world looks and feels very different when you begin to realize that you have to fend for yourself and when you start to see that some of the things you might have idolized when you were younger — like working for a big, famous company or making it up to the corner office or being a high powered attorney — do not always live up to the fantasies.

That moment when you begin questioning what you are doing and start to feel uncertain of your purpose can happen at any time. We can go for years without thinking much about what we are doing day in and day out because we are often too busy to stop and think about it, to be introspective about what we have been doing with our lives and where we are headed. That busyness can also mask changes in what motivates us and what makes us happy to the point that we do not notice until it has become so bad that we are in crisis mode.

An existential crisis is not necessarily a bad thing — people often come out on the other end with a much more complete understanding of who they are and what they want. The problem though, is that they can often cause a lot of collateral damage in the process of dealing with their crisis and because they are responding to a crisis and do not quite know what to do, people also often tend to react in extremes: quitting jobs and relationships or buying expensive cars and boats.

So how do you get the benefit of that crisis of identity and meaning without the downside? You get it by not allowing things to fester until they reach crisis status. Be more introspective. Ask yourself more frequently whether you still like what you are doing and push yourself to be brutally honest about why you do what you do. Asking yourself these questions consistently over time allows you to get to know yourself better and that means you can often make subtle shifts in what you are doing so that you never have to react in a crisis-driven way again.

Jessica H. Lawrence is a former CEO of Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council. She runs her own consulting business and is a respected speaker and frequent consultant on Results-Only Work Environments and on the use of social media for business. Jessica can be reached at jessicahlawrence@gmail.com.

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